From bombs to bouquets: Obama's foreign policy challenges
Updated
North Korea and its nuclear ambitions, could mark the end of Barack Obama's foreign policy honeymoon.
President Obama says the US is fully prepared for any contingencies with North Korea.
But the US President faces much more than just a rogue, nuclear armed, politically unstable North Korea.
An Australian observer says five months into his Presidency, Obama faces a diabolical foreign policy landscape, that'll test the tension between his pragmatism and his liberalism.
Dr Michael Fullilove is global issues director at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney and a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Presenter: Linda Mottram
Speaker: Dr Michael Fullilove, global issues director at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney and a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington
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FULLILOVE: I think the honeymoon continues and you saw that in Cairo. The last time President Bush was in the Middle East, he was dodging shoes. The first time Obama is in the Middle East, he's catching bouquets. So I think the charm offensive continues. I think the international fascination with Obama continues and persists. I think he is gaining prestige from that. I do think though that the harder aspects of the world are starting to intrude and he faces a diabolical set of policy challenges from a shrinking economy, a heating planet, nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, where you've also got succession crises. So he is facing a very difficult landscape. But I do think he is still armed with an enormous amount of goodwill.
MOTTRAM: Well, let's go to some of those hard issues. I mean as you say, North Korea, although he stretched out the hand of friendship, it's hardened on both sides. Iran, he seemed unable to decide how to respond to this disputed election result, the Middle East, okay the Cairo speech in bouquets as you say. But, has anything really changed? I mean that is as you say diabolical. Is he showing any signs that he is capable of solving all of those problems?
FULLILOVE: Well, he's not walking on water yet. He's only been in the Oval office for four or five months. He is showing a determination I think on these issues, for example, on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. This is a priority for him from day one, as opposed to President Bush. But I think what we haven't yet seen is how comfortable an expert Obama is at deploying leverage and pressure, as well as sweet reason. So far he's been quite quick to compromise actually on some domestic issues and also on some international issues. He has come out with this strategy of engagement of reaching out with an open hand to regimes like Iran and North Korea. But of course Pyongyang and the regime in Teheran don't care to much about Obama's exotic lineage or his fine speeches or his Portuguese water dog. International relations is an unsentimental business, so I think the next step is to see how good Obama is at squeezing people and putting them in difficult positions. I think Hillary Clinton and John McCain would attest to his toughness and his ability to deploy leverage, but I think what we've got to do now is see it in the international domain.
MOTTRAM: His critics are coming out quite vocally against him, many of them of course from the Republican side, but are the critics only from the Republican side and only what you'd expect with a change of administration?
FULLILOVE: No, they're not only from the Republican side, but I do think the criticisms from the right in America are indicative in some ways of Obama's success. Sometimes the best measure of your success is when your enemies are confused and divided. And in the United States you have half the right criticising Obama for being the anti-Bush, for being supine and bloodless and weak, for going around the world apologising for America supposedly according to Charles Krauthammer, from the Washington Post, but then you have the other half of the right criticising him for being too much like Bush. You have the Wall Street Journal and other conservative commentators saying in fact his policies on many of these issues like North Korea are not so different from President Bush, so why is everybody being so nice to him.
I thought myself when Dick Cheney came out arguing for more governmental transparency on the issue of detainee techniques. I thought when Dick Cheney is arguing in favour of freedom of information, that shows that Obama has got inside the head of the Republicans.
MOTTRAM: Perhaps so, but he does still have a lot of very hard questions ahead of him and as you say it's those hard, the hard answers that he will have to come up with in pretty quick time, I would have thought. What do you think is going to characterise it. I mean he seems to be a man for all seasons, in many ways. Is that a fair assessment?
FULLILOVE: Look, he has, I think it's a great political skill that he is able to disguise, in some ways, his intentions sometimes. I mean, for example, domestically, when he comes out with an announcement on stem cell research, he's somehow able to package it as though this was not a core belief, that it was something he really struggled with. He's able to sell it from the centre if you like, even if he's governing from the left, I think in terms of his foreign policy, there is a tension between pragmatism on the one hand and liberalism on the other. I think on the one hand, he is actually quite ruthless. Personally, I think he is prepared to shade his campaign promises to conform with the advice of his military commanders. You do not get from the Illinois state senate to the Oval office in four years without an instinctive attraction to things that work and a certain ruthlessness in cutting off things that don't work.
But on the other hand, he is a liberal individual. You see his statements on climate change which he describes as a great moral challenge, his Prague speech on working towards a nuclear free world, the release of the torture memos was a very difficult decision. The decision on Guantanamo. These are all decisions that President Bush would not have made. These are liberal foreign policy decisions, so it will be interesting to see how the tension between these two elements - pragmatism and liberalism - sort of evolves into policy.
